Mobile phones are commonly being configured by manufacturers with functionalities beyond voice communication. Mobile phones are often integrated with digital cameras, text messaging, organization features such as phone books, calendars, and more recently, video viewing capabilities. Another recent trend is to arrange mobile phones as audio playback devices for the wide variety of customized ring tones that are available for download on the Internet. Mobile phones are also increasingly used as music players for the popular MP3 (MPEG-1 audio layer 3 where MPEG stands for “Moving Picture Experts Group”) and other forms of digital music. Mobile phones with integrated music players are expected to become increasing competitive, on a worldwide scale, with purpose-built music players such as Apple Computer's popular iPod® brand of digital music player.
According to recent studies, almost 20 percent of phone owners worldwide now listen to music on their phones. More than a third of mobile phone users globally are expected to choose mobile music as one of the five applications they would like to start using, or use more of in the future, according to the studies. While this trend bodes well for mobile music and increased mobile phone sales in general, several obstacles stand in the way of more widespread adoption of mobile phones with integrated music players. Aside from commercial issues such as the pricing of digital music downloads, addressing the technical and user interface issues associated with downloading music to mobile phones will encourage more people to listen to music on their mobile phones. For example, the relatively small display size of mobile phones (which can reduce the ease of interaction with a music download applications and services), lack of convenient input device beyond the small mobile phone buttons, and the drain on the phone's battery when downloading are several among many prohibitive factors to be overcome before mobile phones can gain more widespread acceptance as music players.